A report from the South
Waziristan Institute of Strategic Hermeneutics to the International
Security Unit of the Obama Transition Team, Washington DC, on the
condition and future of the war on terror.

Part 2 [The first part of
the SWISH report to the ISU of the OTT was published on 8
December 2008]

Introduction

In the first part of this
report we discussed the policies of your predecessor's
administration in relation to their response to the 9/11 attacks.
We reported that in almost every respect the response was misguided
and counterproductive (see "The
SWISH Report (13) - part one",
8 December 2008).

As a result, the standing of
the United States across the middle east and southwest Asia is much
diminished and its military forces are mired in a dangerous and
long-term conflict in Afghanistan that is exacerbated by major
problems in Pakistan. We do not believe that victory has been
achieved (or will soon be achieved) in Iraq; and we hold that the
al-Qaida movement has been dispersed into a loose network that is and
will remain extremely difficult to counter.

We must also report that the
(so far) five-year war in Iraq has resulted in a new generation of
jihadist
paramilitaries who have combat experience in an urban environment
against the world's best-equipped armed forces. From the
perspective of the al-Qaida movement this has been a spectacular
outcome.

In addition, the fact that
your country has sought advice, training and equipment from Israel to
aid it in the protracted war in Iraq - thus strengthening the already
close links between the two states - is of significance in our
report. For this development has aided jihadist
propagandists in their determined efforts to develop a narrative of
Islam under attack from the "crusader/Zionist" coalition - what
they readily see and enthusiastically portray as an axis of evil.

Al-Qaida's aims

In light of these outcomes,
we now have the difficult task of suggesting practical options to
you. But we should first repeat our assessment of the nature of the
al-Qaida movement, since this remains the main focus of the war you
will inherit.

Al-Qaida is best seen as an
unusual transnational revolutionary movement with a series of
short-term aims and one overarching final goal.

The short-term aims are
measured in decades rather than years. They include:

* the eviction of "crusader"
forces from the Kingdom of the Two Holy Places and from all Islamic
lands

* the termination of the
elitist, unjust and pro-western House of Saud, and its replacement
with an acceptable Islamist form of governance

* the elimination of other
unacceptable regimes in the region, including those in Egypt,
Pakistan and Afghanistan.

* the end of the Zionist
project

* support for Islamist
separatists in regions such as Chechnya and southern Thailand

* the humbling and
diminishing of the power of the United States (the "far enemy").

The long-term aim is the
progressive establishment of an Islamist caliphate, initially in the
middle east but ultimately expanding far more widely. This may
take a century or more, so that both the short and long-term aims are
expressed in timescales that do not relate to your own political
system.

We should add that since
this is a revolutionary movement based on a religious belief, there
is an important eschatological aspect. The movement's leadership
does not expect to see its goals achieved in its own lifetime. The
movement is in this perspective viewed as merely the contemporary
aspect of a much greater historical process.

The al-Qaida movement is now
greatly dispersed and has many connections with related movements
across west Asia and south Asia, the middle east, north Africa, and
elsewhere. These include radical Islamist groups in Algeria,
Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan, as well as numerous paramilitary
militias in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One of the most ominous
developments from your perspective is that many jihadist
paramilitaries that are only loosely connected with the al-Qaida
movement increasingly see themselves as part of the global struggle
rather than just engaged in a local or regional conflict. The
conduct of your predecessor's administration has done much to
enhance this.

At the same time, as you
decide your strategy in these circumstances you have three
significant advantages:

* yours is a new
administration, with a president who is more innately
internationalist in personal experience than any United States
president in recent history. Many of America's supporters and
sympathisers, dismayed by the conduct of the George W Bush
administration, are desperate to see the country and its leadership
become more engaged in and collaborative with the world. You
therefore begin with much goodwill

* your country is in such
obvious economic disarray that the electorate will accept radical
ideas that stretch beyond the domestic economy; these include major
changes in military strategy, not least because of the unpopularity
of the Iraq war

* Most of the success of the
al-Qaida movement since 2001 is owed to the mistaken policies of the
Bush administration rather than to any innately intelligent
leadership of its own

You therefore hold
considerable assets at the outset of your term of office. But - as
the first part of this report
concluded - these will only work for you if they are accompanied by
"a far more radical appraisal of new policies than you currently
envisage"; and the adoption of new approaches which in turn "you
will find...hard to implement".

There are four broad areas
where we propose such changes: relations with Israel; Iraq and
the Persian Gulf; Afghanistan-Pakistan; and the al-Qaida movement.

The Israel-Palestine
factor

You have no alternative but
to use your strongest endeavours to try to achieve a just and lasting
settlement to the Israel-Palestine conflict. We do not claim
that Palestinians support the al-Qaida movement, but the issue is a
running sore in their territories and across the middle east in ways
that are of immense and continuing advantage to radical Islamists -
including al-Qaida.

There are great problems too
arising from the Israel/Palestine dispute in neighbouring Arab
states. All too often, ruling elites have been willing to
tolerate the continuation of the conflict - and unwilling to provide
large-scale help over (for example) Palestinian refugees - on the
unacknowledged grounds that the Palestinians' predicament diverts
attention from their own domestic political and social failures. This
situation in turn makes it even harder to address the problem that
the Palestinian people themselves have so little benefited from wise
and competent leadership of their own.

The conclusion to be drawn
from all this is that you must face the fact that as long as the
plight of the Palestinians is unresolved - especially in Gaza, but
not only there - any progress in diminishing the threat from radical
Islamists will be impossible. We recognise the difficulties that
this requirement presents for you, but you asked us to be blunt and
to provide a global (that is, non-western-centric) view. That,
as we see it, is the reality.

How you proceed on this
issue from this point is up to you. We would, however, point to the
Arab peace initiative as of potential value. We would also
remind you that your own domestic electorate is steadily changing in
its view of Israel, moving beyond the potent narrative of "David vs
Goliath" that lasted from the state's founding in 1948 through to
the six-day war of June 1967. The lifespan of this story -
notwithstanding the growth of Christian Zionism among your evangelical churches - is passing. The majority of Americans were not even
born in 1967; it might be useful if you began to register this.

We do not expect rapid
progress. But an unequivocal statement of the requirement for a
viable Palestinian state with a shared capital, followed by sustained
efforts to see that realised, will be welcomed across the region -
including, we suspect, by very many Israelis. Many of
them have come to the understanding that it is no longer viable to
see themselves as "a western state in the wrong place"; and that
they cannot build walls high enough to allow them to pretend that the
rest of the middle east does not exist.

Iraq and the Gulf

You have stated your
intention to withdraw from United States forces from Iraq, but - even
in the context of the agreement with the Iraqi government of Nouri
al-Maliki - few independent analysts believe that your country will
do so fully in the next decade or more. Most American
combat-troops may well leave in the possible event of improvements in
internal security, but Iraq is just too important in terms of the
region's energy security for you to give up all control. We
anticipate that whatever you currently say, several large US bases
and many thousands of troops will remain in the country. This
would be a fundamental mistake, not least in providing a long-term
focus for radical Islamists.

We would thus advise you to
be prepared to remove all your forces (except small-scale
training-missions) within the life of your administration's first
term of office - and to make your intentions in this respect clear
from the outset. In this effort (and on their own account) you
will need to be prepared to engage with all significant regional
actors - including Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran; you may be aided in
this initiative if you recognise that none of Riyadh, Damascus and
Tehran wants chaos or civil war on its doorstep.

More generally, you should
adopt a radical energy policy that as quickly as possible reduces
your country's dependence on oil and gas (especially oil) imports.
The issue of climate change may lie beyond the remit of this report,
but you should know that we fully accept the most reliable current
scientific assessments of the absolute seriousness of this issue. It
is essential - we repeat, essential
- that all
the significant greenhouse-gas emitters reduce their carbon outputs
to an extent far greater than any major government currently
envisages. The requirement for sustainability is 60% cuts
by 2018, and 80% cuts by the late 2020s. If your administration
provides clear leadership-by-example in this area that set the
pattern for ensuing decades, it would perform the most important
global role possible - and increase both national and international
security into the bargain.

In this respect, we fully
support those policy analysts who are outlining programmes that
respond simultaneously to your country's economic and environmental
predicaments. For, to re-emphasise the point about security, a
precious (though little recognised) side-benefit of a radical "green
new deal" is that it would greatly reduce any perceived need to
regard your control of the Persian Gulf region as a strategic
imperative. In this change of focus, you would do to al-Qaida
and other regional Islamists what Mikhail Gorbachev did to you in the
late 1980s - remove the enemy from the scene.

The Afghanistan-Pakistan
arena

The Afghanistan-Pakistan
issue is the most difficult one on which we can advise you, and we
fear you will be even less able to accept what we say here as in
other areas.

Our view, based on close and
sustained expertise in this region, is that the occupation of any
state in the middle east and western Asia by western military forces
is unsustainable. The time has long passed for this to be a
realistic, far less a defensible project - even if awareness of this
fact has yet to penetrate (in the same way that it took as much as
three further decades, if not longer, for some European colonial
powers to realise that the colonial era had effectively ended in
1947).

We believe that the more
military forces are put into Afghanistan, the more the Taliban and
other militias will grow in strength. Beyond that, we contend that
Afghanistan will become a magnet for paramilitaries from across the
region and beyond - bringing in experience, new tactics, techniques
and armaments. Indeed, there are abundant signs that this is
already happening,

As you increase your forces
(and we expect that the process now under way could take United
States/International Security Assistance Forces (Isaf) contingents to
nearly 100,000 personnel by the end of 2009), the more western
Pakistan will be seen as a protected base for paramilitary groups;
this in turn expose your supply-routes to even greater attack, and
further increase the pressure on you to intervene across the border.
But to extend the war to Pakistan on a large-scale basis will be
disastrous, risking wholesale destabilisation of the state.

In short, you have to
completely rethink your strategy in this region. We have to say that
this is the one aspect of your stated international-security approach
that causes us greatest concern. We do not think you should
increase your military forces in Afghanistan; we do not see the
conflict as amenable to a military solution; and we do believe that
there has to be much wider engagement with more moderate militia
elements than anything which has so far been proposed.

In brief, you must
appreciate that your current military posture is part of the problem,
not the solution; and as that posture is strengthened, so the problem
will get worse.

Al-Qaida's thinking

The adequate resourcing of
counter-terrorism activities presents us with no problem. But you do
need to appreciate that the issues of torture, prisoner abuse,
rendition and the camp at Guantánamo have all been of
substantial benefit to the al-Qaida movement. We note that your
new administration is likely to address these issues; and that this,
in combination with what we expect to be a much more multilateral
approach to international relations, will be bad news for the
al-Qaida movement.

We therefore suspect that
the movement will attempt a 9/11-level attack, probably within the
United States, at some point between now and mid-2010. If and
when that happens, your country will require exceptional levels of
political leadership if you are to avoid yet another misguided
military response.

With regard to the status of
the movement as a whole, much will depend on whether you are able to
accept our advice on the issues outlined above. If there is an
evident move towards an Israel-Palestine settlement; if you withdraw
from Iraq; if you downgrade the political necessity to maintain
forces in the wider Persian Gulf region; and if you engage in serious
negotiations in Afghanistan-Pakistan - then the al-Qaida movement
will, in our view, be greatly diminished by around 2012-14.

If, furthermore, you refrain
from using such terms as "war on terror" and "long war against
Islamofascism" and treat the al-Qaida movement as an aberrant
transnational criminal entity which is in no way a reflection of true
Islam then you will treat them for what they are.

There are some areas in
which you cannot play such a central role. These include the
need for scholars of Islam to be more effective in expounding
counter-narratives to the al-Qaida worldview, and the need for
greatly improved governance and socio-economic justice across the
middle east. In relation to the latter, though, you might well
find it appropriate to review your extraordinarily close
relationships with a number of the more markedly elite regimes.

Conclusion

We are aware that our advice
in three of the four major aspects covered in this report -
Israel-Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan-Pakistan - is considerably
more radical than anything you currently propose; but you have
requested our advice and we have given it. We acknowledge that
to accept it is much to ask of you, perhaps especially because it
represents a very different outlook not just from the
neo-conservative vision of a "new American century" but from some
of the assertive realists that you have already invited into your
administration.

If you do prove able to take
this advice, then we are confident that you will both make your
country more secure and create a strong foundation from which to
address formidable global problems of climate change and
socio-economic division during your second term. Should you ask our
advice on these latter issues at some future date, we will be
honoured to respond.

If however you do not take
the advice in this current report, then we anticipate an
exceptionally difficult period in office for what is likely to become
a one-term presidency. In light of the promise you embody as you
prepare to begin your period in office, that would be a double
tragedy: for your country, and for the wider global community.

Wana

South Waziristan

14 December 2008

[The first part of the SWISH
report to the International Security Unit of the Obama Transition
Team was published on 8
December 2008]

This is the thirteenth
report openDemocracy
has published from the South Waziristan Institute of Strategic
Hermeneutics (SWISH). Nine have advised al-Qaida, two the British
governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and one the United States
state department.

"We believe that
disengagement from Iraq, more emphasis on post-conflict
reconstruction in Afghanistan, and vigorous diplomacy in support of a
two-state Israel/Palestine solution offer you the best short-term
hope of avoiding further damage to your government's credibility in
relation to the United States-led war on terror."

"The greatest risk to
your movement is that the opinions of some of the sharper analysts on
both sides of the Atlantic begin to transcend those of the political
and religious fundamentalists that currently dominate the scene. If
that were to happen, then you could be in serious trouble within two
or three years."

"(The) influence of
your movement and your leader is considerable, but you are not in
control of your own strategy; rather, you form just one part of a
wider process that is as diffuse and unpredictable as it is potent.
You could point to the United States failure to control its global
war on terror and you would be correct to do so. You could then claim
that it is your own movement that is setting the pace - but you would
be wrong. The truly revealing development of recent months is that we
have reached a point, five years after 9/11 where no one, but no one,
is in control."

"In Afghanistan and
Iraq, as well as across the wider middle east, it is the power and
influence of the United States that is in crisis. Your movement may
not be entirely coherent and the overall circumstances may be more
complex than a few months ago, but it probably has greater potential
for enhancement and further development than at any time in the past
five years."

"Radical changes in your
policies in relation to Iraq and Israel are essential, together with
a review of policy options for Afghanistan. More generally, you must
start the process of reorientating political and security thinking
towards the real long-term global challenges."

"Our broad conclusions are
that your prospects are good. Developments in Iraq should not worry
you; events in Afghanistan and Pakistan are markedly positive for
you; and the work of your associates elsewhere, including north
Africa, are a bonus.

We do have to confess to one
concern that may surprise you...In a number of western countries the
issue of global climate change is rising rapidly up the political
agenda and one of the effects of this is to begin to make some
analysts and opinion-formers question the western addiction to oil."

"It is said that
revolutions change merely the accents of the elites, and we fear that
such would be the consequence of your movement coming to power. A
lack of flexibility would lead to unbending pursuit of a false purity
that would decay rapidly into a bitter autocracy, leading quite
possibly to a counter-revolution.

If you really want to
succeed then you have to engage in thinking that goes far beyond what
appear to be the limits and flaws of your current analysis. We would
be happy to assist, but we doubt that your leadership will be willing
to allow us to do so. We therefore submit this as possibly our last
report."

"In any case, whatever
his actual policies, we most certainly would expect under an Obama
presidency a marked change in style towards a more listening,
cooperative and multilaterally - engaged America. That must be of
deep concern to you. A more ‘acceptable' America in global terms
is the last thing you want"

"If the far enemy began to
lose interest in your core region, then your movement really would be
in trouble. We will explore this further in a later report; but at
this stage, we would suggest that this could emerge as the most
potent threat to your movement."

Who are 'we' in a moving world?

Our partnership with The Open University brings together academics and artists to ask who – in a time when the lines marking out citizens, borders and nations are being drawn more starkly – 'we' are, and who gets to decide? Read more...

World Forum for Democracy 2017

This year, the theme is ‘populism’. Is the problem fake news or fake democracy? What media, what political parties, what politicians do we need to re-connect with citizens and make informed choices in 21st century democracy?

Civil Society Futures is a national conversation about how English civil society can flourish in a fast changing world.Come and add your voice»

Full coverage of the non-hierarchical conference held in Barcelona on 18-22 June 2017.